The stubborn efforts to impose the scarcity of copies and the control of use in the digital sphere have diverted us away from addressing the real challenges of digital culture. The main one comes precisely from the positive effects of IT and the Internet: more and more people engage into creative and expressive activities. (…) However, our social environment deprives many individuals from this potential development, and limits the others to some degree.

September152011

"The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under censorship and repression has died off. ... The people of Central Europe traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the police.

Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, Havel gave a public speech in
which he assessed the current state of the free Czech Republic. “On the
one hand everything is getting better — a new generation of mobile
phones is being released every week,” he said. “But in order to make
use of them, you need to follow new instructions. So you end up reading
instruction manuals instead of books and in your free time you watch TV
where handsome tanned guys scream from advertisements about how happy
they are to have new swimming trunks... The new consumer society is
accomplished by a growing number of people who do not create anything
of value.”

The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under
censorship and repression has died off. The public intellectual is, for
the most part, no longer invited to the most important parties. Anna
Porter writes, “Now that everyone can publish what they want, what is
the role of the intellectuals?” and she can’t find an answer. It’s no
longer the police state that’s attacking the intelligentsia — it’s
disinterest and boredom. It’s distraction. It’s a trade off. And it’s
one that we should be able to acknowledge and be allowed to mourn. When
the historian Timothy Garton Ash visited Poland in the 1980s, he
admitted to an envy for the environment there. “Here is a place where
people care, passionately, about ideas.” The people of Central Europe
traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the
police. No one could possibly blame them, but at the same time, Havel
and the other leaders had no sense of the true cost of democracy.

[...]

As F. S. Michaels writes in Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything,
“When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you
tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and
act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other
things... Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible
foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of
how the world works.”

[...]

”
Michaels’s book has its faults. Her summations of how the world once
work — meant to both show how much we’ve devoted to this economic story
today and remind us that things can be different — are tinged with the
hue that colors Ostalgie:
the backward-looking amnesia that infects those Central Europeans who
have decided things were so much better under communism, or, if you’re
in the right country, under the Habsburgs. “Back in the 1950s, the
relationship between employees and their companies involved commitment
and reciprocity; workers were committed to the job in return for wages
and promotions, and the company was committed to its workers in return
for their hard work and loyalty.” Well, maybe. But admittance to the
wider workforce was restricted at best. Such a point is like looking
back on the days of incredibly low unemployment in communist Poland...
without mentioning that if anyone protested for safer working
conditions, the police might just shoot him in the head. Every
monoculture will have its downsides, and trading one for another will
always lead to unexpected deficits. But maybe if we acknowledge that
the economic story looks like it’s coming to an unhappy ending of
environmental degradation, widespread poverty, and hunger as resources
become scarce, we can see what we might get in return.

Leaving the economic monoculture, particularly now that it’s a
worldwide system, is not going to be any less of a dramatic act than
Havel’s Velvet Revolution. Michaels makes a strong case that this story
is stripping us of our environment, our creativity, and our personal
happiness. We are, for the most part, bogged down in the daily struggle
for survival, too worried about losing our fragile position within a
corporation to envision an entirely different way of being. It’s going
to take another Havel, someone who can see the world for what it is and
find a better story to tell.

=============================

oAnth:

The problem with thatkind of books is
quite obviously, that they describe rather well the status quo, but
don't give sufficient answers by lack of an adequate analysis of the
socio-economic impact into the cultural and academic sphere, which is
causing the observed depletion.

November072010

Young people have become increasingly obsessed by looks, status, comfort and money. Individualism and hedonism are gaining ground. The youngsters of the new ’Selfish Generation’ are materialistic thrill seekers who have a declining interest in society at large.

In a Dutch research survey by Motivaction, 50 per cent of young people agree with the statement: ‘’Buying something new is one of the things I enjoy most in life.” A similar number (51 percent) feels they are “mostly happy when able to spend money.”

The analysts see their findings as part of a “growing tide of self-satisfaction”. Instant gratification of one’s own needs and a certain apathy towards those of others are typical of the youngest generation.

What is driving this trend? According to the researchers, no generation has ever grown up with so much freedom and independence. “School offers young people less and less structure. And exerting authority has become taboo for parents”. Even worse: many of today’s parents embrace the mentality of the youth culture. They want to be seen as youthful themselves.

In Dutch society we witness a gradual shift in the set of values. The baby boom generation of the 1960s changed their parents’ values – modesty, patience, soberness, and a sense of duty – for individualism and freedom. And they passed on those newfound values to their children.

Some flourish, others suffer. A large group of ambitious, enterprising, mostly highly educated young people are masters in networking and multitasking, and cope well with today’s high paced society, full of opportunity. But a big group of less privileged “outsiders” are less self-sufficient and have trouble dealing with today’s societal complexity.

Here again, we encounter the polarisation along lines of education and social and cultural capital, which is so typical of today’s society at large. The cleavage between higher and lower educated, between those who feel connected to the modern world, and those who feel threatened by the global world is gradually undermining the value system and solidary consensus of the European welfare societies.

Last week in Helsinki, Finland, the Kalevi Sorsa Foundation (the social-democratic think tank) and the Brussels-based Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), organised their Research and Policy Days under the title ‘’Culture and Politics in the Age of Egoism’’.

Very refreshing that in Finland, a country characterised by its high quality of living, not economic issues, but cultural and moral issues were on top of the agenda. ‘’It’s not only the economy, stupid!’’ In contemporary affluent societies, indeed, the danger is not so much coming from economic insecurities, but from cultural, social and moral anxieties and trends. (See the European Revolt of Populism.)

The Helsinki debate came up with some original causes for the age of egoism and the crisis of societal involvement. Fingers were pointed at the loss of historical memory, the decline of social and historical awareness. What is the relevance of historical and cultural knowledge in contemporary European societies? Is our historical and cultural knowledge declining as a result of a more hectic and market oriented environment which has penetrated into the fields of politics and culture? Is there still time for critical thinking and for contemplating the ‘bigger picture’, in a culture characterised by trends such as short-term perspectives, immediacy and discontinuity?

To what extent are the short-sightedness in culture, politics and economy related to the age of egoism, of which the Selfish Generation of the contemporary youngsters are such an unhappy symbol? These existential questions raised in Helsinki are worth a debate within the European progressive family at large.